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Thursday, October 28, 2004

In the early hours of February 27, 2004, Tokyo Metropolitan police
officers raided the headquarters of the Tachikawa Jietai Kanshi Tento Mura
(Tent Mura, or “Tent Village”), an antiwar watchdog organization located in the
western Tokyo suburb of Tachikawa that has been engaged in monitoring the
activities of the Japanese Self Defense Forces since its establishment in 1972.

Three members of Tent Mura
were arrested that day, on grounds that they had violated anti-trespassing laws
when they distributed antiwar flyers at an SDF housing unit one month earlier.
The three, who continue to remain in police custody, have been designated as
Japan’s first recognized prisoners of conscience by Amnesty International.

The Tent Mura activists stand at the crossroads of at least two major
political and historical currents: Japan’s dispatch of its SDF to Iraq and
subsequent efforts to silence vocal opponents to the country’s military policy,
and an unforgiving justice system that is well-known for affording few – if any
– rights to those who are prosecuted with a crime.

System
of criminal injustice?

Tent Mura members have been distributing their anti-military themed
leaflets for years with no problem whatsoever, just as a myriad of other
organizations and businesses continue to leave their flyers in private
mailboxes on a daily basis (including those as innocuous as pizza and sushi
delivery establishments). The three activists have pleaded innocent to the
charges against them, basing their defense on the right to freedom of
expression that is provided for by the Japanese Constitution.

In Japan, however, 99% of defendants are found guilty once
prosecuted – and there is almost no precedent for freedom of speech having been
successfully argued as a line of defense. In what is generally seen as an
attempt to coerce defendants to plead guilty, moreover, prosecutors and courts
in Japan often deliberately drag out the cases of those who plead innocent – as
well as automatically denying them the possibility of being released on bail.
It is of little surprise, therefore, that the majority of those prosecuted in
Japan opt to plead guilty simply to speed up their trial date – especially in
cases where the punishment is a fine rather than jail time. The three Tent Mura
activists have opted to maintain, however, that the mere act of passing out
flyers constitutes no crime.

Japan’s prosecution system is divided into two separate phases: that
of police custody, where defendants are held following their arrest; and
detention centers, where they then await trail. The system of police custody in
Japan is renowned for its severity, and has long been criticized by
organizations such as Amnesty International for its lack of respect for human
rights. Despite the fact that those kept in police custody have yet to be
charged with any crime, they may meet with no outside visitors other than their
lawyers; are kept under strict 24-hour surveillance (often in windowless
rooms); and are normally subjected to anywhere from six to eight hours of
questioning every day.

The three Tent Mura activists were kept in police custody for three
weeks, and all three opted to exercise their right to remain silent during
questioning. While they would normally have been transferred to a detention
center following the formal levying of charges on March 19th, a lack
of available space has resulted in their continuing to remain in police custody
for the time being.

Tent Mura members and supporters are now busily working to collect
the total of six million yen (two million yen for each of the three) that will
be required in order to possibly secure their release on bail following the
initial trial, which has been scheduled for May 6th.

Intensified
antiwar crackdown follows SDF Iraq dispatch

According to other members of Tent Mura, the police department’s
selective application of the anti-trespassing law to antiwar protestors is a
clear indication that the government is determined to quash any organized vocal
resistance to its policies regarding the war taking place in Iraq.

At
the same time as Tent Mura headquarters was being raided, police forcibly
entered the homes of three other group members. The officers conducted invasive
searches of their personal belongings, carried out intensive interrogations,
and confiscated materials such as personal computers and cellular telephones. “We
were completely unprepared for anything like this. It came totally out of the
blue,” comments Mori Inoue, a recent university graduate and Tent Mura member
who recounts the frightening experience of several police officers suddenly
raiding his home early in the morning. “It could just as easily have been me or
any of countless others who was arrested that day, since leafleting is one of
our major activities.”

Inoue explains that a major aim of the police in conducting the
arrests was precisely to scare others away from spreading their antiwar message
to the public. The government is particularly interested in keeping this
message far away from SDF personnel and family members, whom the flyers urged
to think deeply about the meaning of the dispatch to Iraq and to join the
voices of opposition to the Iraqi war.

To some extent, moreover, this government fear tactic has worked.
Leafleting campaigns carried out in other areas of the country that house units
of the SDF, including Yokosuka and Okinawa, have scaled back or been stopped
completely, and one scheduled to begin in Fuchu (near Tachikawa) was abandoned
altogether.

“There is no way we are giving up on spreading our message, though,”
asserts Inoue. “We also want to urge everyone to keep supporting our three
members in detention. The police will deliberately try to drag things on, but
we’ve got to keep the momentum strong.”

History
of organized resistance

Tent Mura was founded in 1972 in an effort to prevent Japan’s Self
Defense Forces from occupying army base land in Tachikawa following the
relocation of U.S. forces to its present site in Yokota.In its quest to spread its anti-military
message, the group copied tactics that had been used with success by other
activist groups.

“We were inspired by what had happened earlier that year at the U.S.
military supply station located at Sagami Bay, where a group of local citizens
and students set up tents to prevent war supplies from being sent to Vietnam,”
explains founding member and seasoned antiwar activist Katsuko Kato. “We
decided to use the same strategy in Tachikawa by pitching tents and protesting
the SDF. It was an exciting grassroots movement, and there were all different
kinds of people involved.”

Tent Mura also shares roots with the organized resistance that
occurred in 1955 following the end of the Allied Occupation, when the U.S.
military tried to expand the Tachikawa base to the neighboring farming town of
Sunagawa. Government officials began appearing at residents’ homes in the
middle of the night to coerce them to sell their land, which resulted in severe
family breakdowns and most of the area’s 200 landowners eventually opting to
vacate.

Nationwide protests prevented the expansion from occurring, however,
which led to the decision to relocate the base to the site in Yokota. Since the
relocation did not occur until 1977, the Tachikawa base site was utilized by
both the U.S. military and the Japanese SDF for five years. Tent Mura directs
its protests at both institutions, due to its fundamental desire to eliminate
militarism in all of its forms.

Tent Mura is no stranger, moreover, to direct clashes with
authority. When the group’s efforts failed to prevent the SDF from occupying
the base land, ten members including Kato held a sit-in protest at the site as
the forces moved in – and ended up spending three days in jail as a result.
Undeterred, however, they continued on.

In 1975, Tent Mura headquarters was destroyed by an arsonist – and
police then prevented the group from setting up again near the base. The
activists responded by renting a nearby apartment, and investing in a
full-fledged sound system with which to broadcast their anti-military message
outside the base. While police officers at first tried to stop them, they
eventually tired of chasing the protesters away. “It was truly a battle of the
wills between the police and our members in terms of who would back down first,”
explains Kato.

When the SDF announced plans to construct a new runway for the base
in the early 1980’s, Tent Mura knew they had a challenge on their hands. Not to
be fazed, Kato recalls that group members began conducting extensive research
into possible methods by which to thwart the plans for construction. While
stopping it altogether did not appear feasible, the group came up with the idea
to limit the runway’s scope by legally purchasing property surrounding the
proposed site.

Group members studied local newspaper listings, and managed to
scrape together enough savings and donations to purchase a tall building close
to the southern end of the runway site with an apartment for rent on the top
floor. The northern end presented more difficulties, however, since it was
surrounded by private farmland. Tent Mura members consulted with one of the
landowners, who was a member of the organization working against the Sunagawa
base expansion, and secured permission to build a structure onsite. The result
was a 21 meter-high iron pole, which rested on a solid concrete base and
displayed a red flag symbolizing the organization’s anti-base stance.

While the runway did end up being built as scheduled, the strategic
positioning of the two structures greatly restricted the flight path of
incoming and outgoing military planes – evidence that the group’s creative act
of resistance had indeed paid off.

Following repeated acts of vandalism against the flagpole and
intense pressure from authorities to take it down, however, the landowner
eventually succumbed and asked Tent Mura to oblige. “In the end, though, we
didn’t mind,” explains Kato. “This just meant that we could start using the
land for raising crops, which we felt was another life-affirming way by which
we could actively resist the use of land for purposes connected with the
military.”

Future
of antiwar protest in Japan

The recent arrest of the three Tent Mura members seems to be part of
a broader trend of heavy-handed police response to those who dare to speak out
against the Japanese government’s policies with regard to the war in Iraq.
Other recent incidents include a young man who was given a 14-month jail
sentence for writing an antiwar graffiti message, a protester who was arrested
in Asahikawa, Hokkaido (from where SDF units were dispatched to Iraq), and a
police raid on the home of an activist who engaged in regular peaceful protests
of the Iraqi war in front of the U.S. embassy.

Kato, whose lifework as a peace activist was inspired by a diary
left behind by her father that recounted his experiences as a soldier with the
Japanese army in China prior to World War II, laments this trend as being
grounded in an attempt by the government to prevent citizens from engaging in
organized action to protest Japan’s action of sending its SDF forces to Iraq.

She cites historical examples of periods when such activism flourished
in Japan, including a gathering of 200,000 people at the Diet to protest the
Japan-U.S. Security Treaty during the 1960’s; impassioned anti-military
activism on the part of Tent Mura and other groups in the 1970’s; and thriving
citizen movements around many different social causes during the 1980’s. “The
illegalization of activities that are as benign as leafleting is devastating to
groups such as ours, who can’t afford to pay to utilize mainstream media
channels,” she says. “The government is just cutting off our voice at the
source.”

Granted, today’s generation of activists now have at their disposal
the powerful tools of the internet and e-mail, which has clearly altered the
landscape of citizen organizing in fundamental ways. Tent Mura’s gutsy history
of “on-the-frontlines” activism, however, is certainly one that continues to
deserve profound respect.

--Kimberly Hughes (originally published at the Pacific Asia Resource Center newsletter, October 2004)

A
demonstration / meeting to protest the prosecution of the three Tent Mura
members and share information and resources with regard to antiwar and
anti-base issues will be held on Sunday, April 25th at 1:00 p.m. at Hitotsubashi
University (seven minutes’ walk from JR Kunitachi station).Room # will be posted at the main gate to the
university on the day of the event, or contact Tent Mura directly for details.
All concerned individuals are encouraged to attend.

From the Tent Mura pamphlet:

We will act against bases
here in Tachikawa and wars, now and in the future. Although we face a hard
struggle, let’s move on together towards the goal of a society which has no
wars, massacres, discrimination or oppression.